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Finding Tulsa 11

I admit it. I stole a canvas, folded it away in the attic. I’d painted the last
layer myself, in a light cream I’d mixed, a dual spatter of brown and beige,
followed by intricate wainscoting with a wet blend wood pattern. I’d even
made a small mouse hole at one corner. There was no losing that. I hated how
a canvas could be lost, thrown out, how all the work disappeared and all I had
were programs and memories. So, I stole it. It became my sail for the journey
that never seems to end. (remember to pause dramatically here)
I’m not returning it, I’m sorry to say. I still need to hold on to a bit of my
memory, to remember when I learned the secret of theatre. It wasn’t in a book.
It wasn’t in a script or a title or a performance. It was somewhere in between
that paint and those layers of signatures, glyphs of all sizes, bits of immortality
and belief in a myth and a tale, enough to tell it again and again until there
was no more time, when you tired of the tale and merely wanted to tell tales
of the time when you were telling the tale.

Well, that’s a bunch of crap.
Have to trim that last part later. The four-dollar rum and Coke is get-
ting to me, and the businessclone is looking handsome under the plane’s
dim lights, having spread his legs deliberately to touch my thigh. I don’t
retreat.
Not here on the plane. Numbers traded like baseball cards. A meeting
somewhere back home, in some field or hotel, somewhere close to home,
where I can christen some haunt of my childhood’s ghost with some new
juice.
But of course I don’t need company to do that.
This is an autobiography, the story somebody else might write about
me, because after twenty years of hard work, I’m finally an overnight
success.
You’re saying, how old is this guy? I started doing theatre at fourteen.
That’s when I learned how to lie to stay alive.
Making movies is fun and don’t let anyone tell you different, even me.
But the worst part is dreaming movies, almost every night; brilliant Busby
Berkeley nude go-go boy riot musicals; burning buildings and singing di-
nosaurs. These are the sad ones, doomed to an audience of one.
Take the redemption angle on last night’s dream: My long-lost uncle
is homeless. His teeth are rotten. Despite my efforts to dress him up and
get him clean, he returns to the streets, curling himself up in a cardboard
box. I woke up from that one crying, not because of my uncle’s fate, but
because no one would back it even if it could be a movie.